Quote Originally Posted by retrospect View Post
This kind of thinking is seriously flawed. To start with, testing is backwards looking. The "new' cases today caught the virus on average, 12 days ago. So 12 days ago we had 500 cases that we have now detected. It is doubling every 3 days. Get out your calculator. That means we have 8000 cases today that we will have managed to detect in 12 days. About 0.5% to 1% of those will die if we can treat them all. That's what 5 dead from 500 known cases is. If we are overwhelmed and can't treat them all it will be 5% or more. So between 40 and 400 of the people who have so far caught the virus already will die.

When we get 40 to 400 dead from 8000 known cases we will go into lock down. But by then there will be 128,000 cases that will be detected 12 days later.

By Monday we will have over 1000 cases detected. When Italy had 1000 cases detected, 10 days later they had 10,000 and their death rate was moving up over 5%. We will too. Every country had been like this with minor variations in the proportion of cases detected.
Sorry mate, but seriously I hope you are wrong on this, otherwise we will all be damned !!

Italy was a very bad case and I think there government handled it very poorly from the start, also, with the Italian cultures of kissing both cheeks on greeting, that's just asking for trouble, and with the European Union's basically non-existence border security, I sure hope that Australia being so far away and with no direct land access, will face a much lesser outbreak !! besides, when Italy started, the world knew a lot less of the virus and how it will spread back then, a few weeks is a lot more time for us to be prepared and to be alerted, hope we are in a far better position to deal with this.

God Bless Australia !!